Wall Mounting Service: Prevent Flatpack Furniture Tip-Overs
Nobody wants accidents to happen in their homes. Unfortunately, they’re sometimes unavoidable, but there are steps that you can take to ensure you minimise the chances of accidents happening as much as possible.
One surprisingly common accident that happens in the home is furniture tipping over. Flatpack furniture, such as wardrobes, chests of drawers, tables and everything in between, can seriously or fatally injure someone if they tip over. This is particularly concerning if you have young children in your home. This is why it’s crucial to ensure your furniture is as secure, sturdy and resistant as possible, and this guide is here to give you some ideas of how you can do that safely and cost-effectively.
Safety of Flatpack Furniture
Flatpack furniture comes with its fair share of risks once they’ve been built. Many off-the-shelf flatpack furniture products like freestanding wardrobes, chests of drawers, bedside tables and other bedroom furniture can be built and last an incredibly long time. However, there is always a risk; they could fall over if they’re freestanding and not fixed to a wall.
Falling furniture presents clear health and safety risks to people in the home, often causing a huge mess that takes a long time to clean up. You avoid these kinds of issues with fully-fitted bedroom furniture, such as IKEA fitted wardrobes, which Unflatpack specialise in creating. However, when it comes to moving house, freestanding flatpack furniture has the advantage of being transportable, hence why some homeowners prefer this flexibility.
Although some flatpack home furniture is weighty and reliable, there’s still the potential of it tipping over if no proper care and attention are given to moving it. Any piece of furniture needs to be safely positioned and not pose a risk to anyone nearby.
So how can you ensure that your furniture isn’t going to pose a risk and potentially injure anybody in your house? The tips outlined below should be a good starting point.
6 Tips for Preventing Furniture Tip-Overs
- Purchase furniture anchors.
While your flatpack furniture may come with plastic cable ties (depending on where you buy it from), these are quite unreliable. The plastic can degrade and break over time, and it may snap during a tip-over if a piece is particularly hefty. Furniture anchors (otherwise known as furniture restraints or tethers) such as angle braces are a good workaround for this.
- Use a minimum of two restraints per piece.
Speaking of restraints, it’s recommended that you use a minimum of two per piece of furniture. Wider pieces may require additional tethers. A combination of restraints means your furniture is going to stay fixed to multiple solid parts of your walls, meaning it’s increasingly unlikely to fall.
- Install into solid timber.
Ensure any tethers you use are installed into a solid piece of wood on the back or top of your furniture. You’ll often find that some flatpack furniture comes with thin wood pieces or other materials on the back which could not accommodate large screws, so ensuring you have a solid wood backing means it’s that little bit sturdier.
- Attach anchors to wall studs.
Wood studs are great to use for attaching furniture onto if you want to ensure it stays upright. You may need to adjust your screw size to ensure it’s installed securely and tightly into the wall stud, and avoid using plastic anchors if possible.
- Regularly check your restraints are tight.
For total peace of mind, it’s worth booking a flatpack furniture assembly specialist to come and ensure your furniture is safely installed and secure. If this were booked when you purchased the furniture, they would do a safety check anyway. However you install your furniture, you should always check that the restraints are tightly fixed in place.
- Invest in a wall mounting service.
Arguably the most important thing you can do to ensure your furniture is securely fixed and won’t tip over is to book a furniture wall mounting service.
Wall Mounting Services from Unflatpack
At Unflatpack, we are committed to ensuring each piece of furniture in your home is professionally fitted, installed, assembled and reliable. Our experience in handling IKEA fitted furniture has helped us provide a customised, bespoke service for flatpack furniture assembly, offering you something unique to your home, space and needs.
To find out more, please get in touch directly via our contact form.